I'm gonna be here in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think I'll do it the long way around."

~ ~ ~ Sentence 246 ~ ~ ~

He embarrassed me by making a show of thinking it over again, making me feel like I was just a half-pissed glib poltroon.

~ ~ ~ Sentence 252 ~ ~ ~

I'd pretty much pissed away most of my Whuffie -- all the savings from the symphonies and the first three theses -- drinking myself stupid at the Gazoo, hogging library terminals, pestering profs, until I'd expended all the respect anyone had ever afforded me.

Holy shit, was it ever audacious: since the first Mansion opened in California in 1969, no one had ever had the guts to seriously fuxor with it.

~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,626 ~ ~ ~

Long after his software company was sold, long after he'd made his nut, he was dressing up in silly disguises and hitting the tables, grinding out hand after hand of twenty-one, for the sheer satisfaction of Beating The House.

She'd been exposed to a lot of hard rads and low gee and had generally become pretty transhuman as time went by, upgrading with a bewildering array of third-party enhancements: a vestigial tail, eyes that saw through most of the RF spectrum, her arms, her fur, dogleg reversible knee joints and a completely mechanical spine that wasn't prone to any of the absolutely inane bullshit that plagues the rest of us, like lower-back pain, intrascapular inflammation, sciatica and slipped discs.

~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,980 ~ ~ ~

She set fire to the neighbors' apartments, wrapped herself in plastic sheeting, dry-humped the furniture.

~ ~ ~ Sentence 1,999 ~ ~ ~

_Oh, shit._ "Great," I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mental inventory of my responsibilities dirtside.

~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,104 ~ ~ ~

Despite my recent disillusion with castmember bullshit, I found his schtick comforting.

~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,303 ~ ~ ~

The scaffolding made for a nice weenie, a visual draw that would pull the hordes that thronged Debra's Hall of Presidents over for a curious peek or two.

"Debra, you are purely full of shit, and your work is trite and unimaginative.

~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,628 ~ ~ ~

You're a fucking despoiler and you don't even have the guts to admit it."

~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,694 ~ ~ ~

All the history we have with this place -- all the history that the billions who've visited it have -- it's going to be destroyed and replaced with the sterile, thoughtless shit that's taken over the Hall.

Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University.

~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,099 ~ ~ ~

They held classes out front attended by grade- conscious brown-nosers who worried that the ad-hocs' classes wouldn't count towards their degrees.

~ ~ ~ Sentence 3,102 ~ ~ ~

The profs spent their course-times whoring for Whuffie, leading the seminars like encounter groups instead of lectures.